Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X
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Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X |
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Issue 10. The Visualization of the Subaltern in World Music. On Musical Contestation Strategies (Part 1) |
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Brazilian Hip-Hop Material and Ideology: a Case of Cultural Design |
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Author: Derek Pardue Abstract (E): Over the past decade scholars from a wide range of academic disciplines have approached the significance of hip-hop as one of the most pervasive popular cultural forms in the contemporary world. For the most part, proponents and critics alike have focused on hip-hop as a solely rhetorical medium of expression. In this essay I examine the materiality of Brazilian hip-hop by analyzing the graphic design of rap music compact disc covers. Local rap producers intentionally draw from a field of local and translocal "reality" signs to create a sense of authority and true representation. From this perspective I am able to penetrate and illustrate local sub-genres of hip-hop. Ultimately, I argue that to better appreciate the cultural meanings of Brazilian hip-hop one must understand the visual materiality of practitioners' cultural production. Abstract (F): Depuis une décennie, des chercheurs de disciplines très variées ont considéré le hip hop comme une des formes culturelles populaires les plus répandues du monde contemporain. En général, les défenseurs comme les critiques de cette musique n'ont vu dans le hip hop qu'un outil d'expression purement rhétorique. Dans cet article j'analyse la base matérielle du hip hop brésilien à travers la typographie des pochettes de disques de la musique rap. Les producteurs locaux de rap multiplient à dessein les emprunts à une "réalité" locale et translocale afin de créer une sensation d'autorité et d'authenticité. Cette perspective m'aide à creuser et à illustrer des variantes locales du phénomène hip hop. Enfin, je défends l'idée qu'afin de mieux comprendre les significations culturelles du hip hop brésilien il est important d'avoir une bonne connaissance de la culture visuelle de ceux qui produisent ce genre de musique. |
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Rather than concentrating on lyrics or sound engineering, I focus in this article on the graphic design of Brazilian rap CDs, for local hip-hoppers invest a significant amount of time and energy in connecting particular images, colors, and typographies to a range of ideologies regarding "reality." In so doing, hip-hop producers, performers, and consumers develop an empowering cultural literacy, which establishes a set of guidelines for hip-hop interpretation and promises cohesion in ethical and aesthetic tastes. Presently, there are two major competing styles of hip-hop design in Brazil - "marginal" and "positive." In the following sections I offer background information to Brazilian hip-hop production, outline a theory of cultural design, and provide ethnographically based analysis of compact disc graphic art. I draw from over four years of fieldwork in São Paulo, the undisputed center of hip-hop performance and production in Brazil.
Background and Context
Over the past decade, increased financial and ideological investment in rap music both as a legitimate part of the popular music industry in the Brazilian urban markets of São Paulo, Porto Alegre, Brasília, and to a lesser extent Rio de Janeiro and Curitiba, and as a community and state-sponsored educational and cultural activity for shantytown adolescents, has resulted in the formation of an orthodoxy within a general "economy of meaning" (Hall 1997). Through organized debates, recording practices, and marketing strategies local practitioners have created a hegemonic kind of rap - the "marginal" style (local term). Following a basic tenet of Marx, I argue that changes in the way humans act on the "external" world correlate to changes in people's "very own nature" (Marx 1967). "Marginal" hip-hoppers use images to represent the outside world, which they limit for political reasons to the periferia, in a manner that they propose transforms that world and consequently transforms them as well. Periferia (periphery) is the socio-geographical term, which symbolizes São Paulo's suburban spaces and Brazilian ideologies of race and class during 20 th century processes of urbanization (Bonduli and Rolnik 1979; Caldeira 2000; Fabris 2000; Sevcenko 1993). To understand the practice of hip-hop cultural design and the meanings involved I investigate not only the variety of material signs but also the social relations among hip-hoppers in the process of producing CDs (music commodities). The materiality and sociality of hip-hop are necessarily entangled in the intentionality of hip-hop producers, because it is within the dynamic of hip-hoppers' interpretations and intentions about "reality" that they are most focused in producing meanings ("misrepresentations" or not). Hip-hoppers implicitly make correlations between the technologies of image manipulation that comprise the appearance of the CDs and their perspectives on "reality." It is the definition and description of "reality" that guides hip-hoppers in their understanding of themselves and the world around them. The practice of expressing "reality" necessarily takes on tones of morality (right and wrong) and aesthetics (good and bad). Under the "marginal" ethical and aesthetic system, hip-hop participants foreground "violence" as an empowering discourse and image-sound resource with which they hope to represent and thus transform their marginalized position within society. In an interview published in one of the major hip-hop periodicals, the group Filosofia Gangsta (Gangsta Philosophy) subscribes to gangsta rap "not because of the message per se but due to the form in which the messages are conveyed, the aggressive style. We use this label as a style of identification.we preach gangsterism against the horrible things that happen in the ghetto" (Rebello 1997). In 1997 during a hip-hop event sponsored by a posse from Perús in the Northwest section of São Paulo, in an informal interview the rap group Verbo Pesado (Heavy Verses) call themselves "criminals of [media] communication." They made a point of speaking directly into my tape recorder to state: "hold on y'all, the terror hasn't even begun yet" (Verbo Pesado 1997). Over the past five years an alternative model has emerged, one that seeks to offer different narratives, sound scapes, and graphic design. Hip-hoppers have termed this new movement within hip-hop overall as "positive" ( rap positivo ). In this article I represent these two competing systems of ideology, ethics, and aesthetics as a dialogue between the "marginal" (actually the dominant) and "technological" systems. As it stands, in fact, most São Paulo hip-hoppers do not identify with contemporary technology in a direct fashion. Despite the fact that sound production is based on technological manipulation of pre-recorded sounds, hip-hoppers explicitly present images of grounded transparency. It is important to note that the trope of transparency is an intentional choice. In this way my analysis of periferia aesthetics differs significantly from a prevalent perspective that working class aesthetics are a function of necessity. Bourdieu, especially in Distinction (1984), makes such claims. As Caldeira explains in her work on socio-geographical segregation in contemporary São Paulo, equating working class aesthetics with necessity is part of a dominant discourse, which correlates periphery residents with criminals. They think and thus act solely out of need (2000: 67-8). Instead, hip-hoppers urge listeners to take the material of periferia (shantytown suburbia) reality juxtaposed with messianic or hand-written lettering and reevaluate it, i.e. to transcend the misery and consider the potential. Hip-hoppers present the signs as a vehicle to return the viewer or listener to the reality of life conditions filled with danger, frustration, and struggle, thus transcending the misery of their life conditions and reconsider the potential of such material as something positive, professional, and constructive.
Cultural Design: A Theory of Hip-Hop Authority
To better represent the writerly force or intentionality in hip-hop I have developed a theoretical framework, "cultural design." I combine what I take to be the strengths of social theory and graphic design. In this manner I hope to better approach the elemental levels of meaning-making in hip-hop. "Design" is a word rarely seen in cultural studies texts. By contrast, "culture" is a hot qualifier for graphic designers. "Cultural design" [1] incorporates the critical and generative aspects of graphic arts and social science. The major premise of this theory is that persons order the world into meaningful environments composed through orchestrations of texts, images, movements, and sounds. Part of the significance attributed to these places and activities comes from individual or group "occupations." However, an important aspect of meaning and thus social difference and distinction is engineered. In this project, I focus on the expressive form of rap music as part of hip-hop activity in São Paulo, Brazil. Rap music is particularly revealing for its very compositional and hermeneutic nature involves an emphasis on construction and production that aims to link ideology to sound and image. "Cultural design" as a theory of meaning-making and identification allows one to better understand and explain facets of signification often outside of focal awareness as persons navigate market spaces of ideology, identity formation, and entertainment. Jonathan Sterne asserts in his work on programmed music and consumer culture in U.S. shopping malls that "music becomes part of the consistency of that space [malls]; [it] works as an architectural element of a built space devoted to consumerism" (Sterne 1997: 23, 25). Similarly, images become an "architectural element" in the construction and interpretation (semiotic occupation) of CD production and consumption. In the case of Brazilian rap, the galeria downtown shopping malls, the major space of hip-hop commerce, are "devoted" to a particular kind of consumerism - one that elicits an ideological recognition of social critique vis-à-vis periferia ("marginal") , diaspora and internet ("positive") as well as a visual imagination of different perspectives on "reality."
An Ethnography of Hip-Hop Images: The "Marginal" and "Positive"
Participants connect hip-hop ideologies and communicative graphics back to the material and social conditions of periferia places. Hip-hop participants preach art as "work" and beyond mere "representation" or "mimesis." Art, in this sense, is productive as the form and content engage in dialogue to effect a potentially resistant signifying practice. The following fieldwork vignette demonstrates such an articulation. In March of 2002, I met DJ Giba [2] in what appeared to me to be a festival of gore performed in local hip-hop style. This seemed to be a typical "marginal" hip-hop event. Some days prior, DJ Giba, the key hip-hop figure at the community radio station Radio Alerte, had invited to me a hip-hop event sponsored by the editor of Rap Brasil, one of the leading hip-hop magazines in Brazil. Located in a nameless, downtown nightclub, the show featured a series of local DJs and rappers. They competed for an interview spot in an upcoming issue of Rap Brasil. The master of ceremonies, magazine editor Rogério, tried to keep the audience interested and hyped by constantly promising the appearance of Gog, the legendary rapper from Brasília now living in nearby Campinas and recording in São Paulo. Gog had brought his "family," young rappers and DJs he is promoting. After an hour of walking in circles in the bizarre after-hours wasteland called Bom Retiro neighborhood, I finally found the club. This area of São Paulo's downtown is a haven for underground sweatshops, where Korean, Brazilian, and Bolivian entrepreneurs exploit recently Bolivian and Korean immigrants (legal and illegal). It is a space of mutirões , group housing projects organized by local human rights workers such as Regina of Gaspar Garcia. [3] By nightfall, it is an empty and dangerous place. Clubs, such as this evening's hip-hop locale, remain nameless for reasons of security and market turnover. Property values are at rock bottom, risks of violence are high, and therefore, there is little motivation to invest in a theme-oriented nightclub. It changes from hip-hop to forró (genre of Northeastern folk music) to heavy metal to whatever. I found DJ Giba glowing. He admired Rogério and felt honored to be a judge for the contest. We watched the rappers together and in between acts I asked Giba about his scores and his approach to being a judge. He defined his categories - message, consciousness, reality, DJ performance, and rhyming skill. After the third or fourth group, I couldn't help but notice that all the lyrics were about death and the gory details of periferia violence. One rapper, in particular, sported a homemade T-shirt and baseball cap featuring guns and blood as visual motifs. I asked Giba for the name of the group - Solução (Solution). What kind of "solution" was this? Giba explained that, in fact, he knew this moleque (kid). He lived near Radio Alerte and often called in to ask questions and participate in live interviews with rappers and DJs during the radio shows. Giba went on to say that through these conversations he knew that this rapper modeled himself after Facção Central (Central Faction), a group Giba himself admires. Giba impressed upon me the importance of telling stories of violence and this very act is radical. Through his radio shows, communities have formed. "We exchange information and we learn from each other." Although Giba felt in his role of judge that Solução needed to work on their stage performance and rhyme schemes, Giba gave them high scores on message, consciousness, and reality. As an aside, Giba commented to me that he appreciated the T-shirt and cap, because it signaled a basic "attitude" that "não tem mais silêncio na periferia" (we [those in the periferia ] are no longer silent). For Giba, the members of Solução and others the gory details of violence and death are not merely spectacle and fanfare; they are part of (re)imaging and (re)imagining the periferia. For them this marks and end to the taboo of aestheticizing the elements of daily life.
In these two examples members of Racionais MCs and the two graphic design partners at Diretoria A.G. selected certain visual signs that they thought "combined" ( combinacão ) with the overall narrative and sonic themes. The first example is an image strip from the two-page "centerfold" insert of the 1997 CD release "Surviving in Hell" ( Sobrevivendo no Inferno ) and the second image is the CD cover from the 1998 compilation recording entitled "In Society's Aim" ( Na Mira da Sociedade ). The term " combinar " is a common way in São Paulo of expressing articulation or appropriate connection and is fundamental to hip-hop evaluation as participants judge the looks, sounds, and stories of each other during performances and listening sessions. For the members of Racionais MCs and for the majority of consumers of their legendary 1997 release there was a significant appreciation of the layout of this insert. I had difficulty gaining personal access to Racionais MCs; however, in a number of interviews conducted shortly after the CD was released into the marketplace Mano Brown and DJ KL Jay commented on the "spirit" ( espírito ) of what they do. In the publication Caros Amigos Mano Brown explained that a rap CD should be "like a news report" (in Amaral 1998: 5). In his response to an interview question he mentioned the series of photos of neighborhood friends to which the CD is dedicated ("in memory of") as a "combination" to "reality" and a hip-hop moral obligation. In my conversations with local hip-hoppers representing all four elements, when asked to comment on this famous "centerfold," many remarked on the theme of news report. They appreciated this stance and some specifically mentioned how in this manner Racionais MCs connected with Public Enemy and Chuck D's well-known statements about rap's role as a "black CNN." In fact, Racionais MCs throughout the CD utilize the Courier typewriter font to emphasize the transparency of their narratives as indeed daily reports of "millions of manos [brothers]." The message is clear: the periferia is a space of misery but one "we" [residents and the intended public of hip-hop] share - " periferia é periferia (em qualquer lugar)" (periphery is periphery [everywhere]). In the case of Diretoria A.G. and the product "In Society's Aim" the primary visual signification emerges from the play between the target icon and the fragmented stencil lettering. The transparency and focused "reality" embodied in the image and concept of target is an important part of hip-hop performance and consumers' interpretation. In informal conversations about participants' motivation for "doing hip-hop" ( fazer hip- hop), many hip-hoppers told stories of being or at least feeling like a target of police brutality and general negative stigma from the Brazilian media and bourgeoisie. However, and this is the potential force of hip-hop, being a target is different from being abandoned in the sense that targets must move to survive. Although some rappers use abandono (abandonment) in their narratives, alvo and mira (target and aim, respectively) are much more common and productive. The feeling of abandonment is a narrative of isolation, distance, and hopelessness. There is nothing to engage within a discourse of abandono . On the other hand, the conceptualization of daily life in the periferia as a struggle against targeting forces signifies action and this is what hip-hoppers intend - active participation and social motivation. This " combina " (articulates) to what hip-hoppers intend in their discourses about "consciousness." Diretoria A.G. along with rappers such as NDee Naldinho have incorporated the target icon as part of several CD covers. NDee Naldinho is interesting in that, unlike Racionais MCs who have enjoyed remarkable airplay and sales in middle and upper class clubs and music stores, he has made his professional career solely in the periferia as a showman and crowd pleaser. Naldinho moves the crowd with anthems of marginal life. Diretoria A.G. utilized stenciled lettering with the icon of target to create a coherent visual layout. In a phone conversation the two partners explained that they had had a meeting with members of all the groups represented on the compilation album. Sérgio impressed upon me that it is virtually impossible to get all the members to come to a meeting or give their ideas about CD images. "Some rappers não tão nem aí (don't care at all), but some are really concerned with how the thing is going to look. They know that that is important if they want their message to be heard." When I asked about the typography, Sérgio remarked that the block lettering works in multiple ways to "combine" with hip-hop. First, it links to o sistema (the system), for hip-hoppers recognize official, government signs as stenciled. Some associate stenciled lettering with institutional uniforms or large building signs. The significance of fragmentation enters at this point. In my conversations with hip-hoppers, they expressed the ideology of change in terms of "opposition" to the "system." For example, graffiti artists mark (and thus oppose the rules of) public places visually; rappers enjoy appropriating rhetorical signs of the "system" (e.g. law, judgment, rules, command) and changing them in some way. In Na Mira da Sociedade, designers Sérgio and Fanta cracked the stenciled lettering in the title as a visual reply to being the target of society. In the CD insert pages they continue this theme of visual opposition by literally shooting holes in "system" typography. I showed these images to various hip-hoppers throughout São Paulo and many thought the image of bullet holes next to or taking a piece out of the stenciled lettering was da hora (cool) and muito forte (very strong). The connotation associated with the latter term is one of strong emotion and psychological effect. While "marginal" hip-hoppers use the signs to return the viewer-listener to the reality of life conditions filled with danger, frustration, struggle, and partially fulfilled subjectivities, proponents of the recent movement of "positive rap" ( rap positivo ) or "evangelical rap" ( rap evangélico ) seek to decenter "violence" as the primary discourse of signification. In this turn, "positive" hip-hop representation moves towards the abstract or what appears to be abstract. This includes the Internet, diaspora, and notions of cosmopolitanism. The following image snippets from the 2001 CD of Brazilian hip-hop pioneers Thaíde e DJ Hum and the 2002 CD by newcomer Professor Pablo represent such intentions.
"This is the Way Humanity Goes" ( Assim Caminha a Humanidade ) was the last joint recording by rapper Thaíde and DJ Hum. For this release they signed a contract with Trama, a recording and marketing agency founded in 1998 by João Marcelo Bôscoli and the brothers Cláudio and André Sjazman. Bôscoli, son of legendary bossa nova and MPB artists Elis Regina and Ronaldo Bôscoli and experienced musician in his own right, started with convenient contacts of MPB (Música Popular Brasileira). By 2000 Bôscoli and the Szajman brothers had quickly moved into the hip-hop market and employed designers to work with local rappers to conceive a new look for hip-hop and make their mark in consumers' field of recognition. Thaíde, a longtime proponent of "positive" hip-hop, has consistently described situations of racial self-knowledge ( negritude ), community building, and popular music history (soul, funk, samba-rock). In addition, Thaíde has intimated in our brief conversations that he embraces globalization as a positive force for the greater parameters of hip-hop information exchange. It is in this vein that the internet-inspired typography and linguistic montage find their places of significance on the 2001 CD cover. Running vertically down the right side of the cover there are a number of translations of the word "humanity" overlapping each other. Such typographical signs complement the placelessness of the CD cover background. Thaíde and DJ Hum point to the consumer (interlocutors) from a seemingly universal position. Their narratives can potentially apply in myriad of grounded realities. For Professor Pablo's part, he taps into the visual signs of the African diaspora in the layout of his 2002 CD release Estratégia (Strategy). Professor Pablo is "semi-independent" in that he was much more involved in the material collection and conceptual design of his CD than Thaíde and DJ Hum but did benefit from the modest infrastructure of 7 Taças, the "evangelic" hip-hop recording studio founded by his friend Pregador Luo (Preacher Luo). The term " evangélico " throughout Latin America refers to worshippers and practices associated with any form of Christianity other than Catholicism. Professor Pablo is part of a current trend within "positive" hip-hop to reassert negritude as part of a larger socio-religious program. Rather than maps of periferia neighborhoods or quebradas (local slang term) , Pablo chose sketches of continental maps showing South America, Africa and Europe. In July of 2002 I had the opportunity to talk with Professor Pablo. We met outside a public debate sponsored by the NGO Ação Educativa. With the help of André, a mutual friend, I asked for a ride to the nearest subway station. As we reflected about the ups and downs of the debate, which had featured Racionais DJ KL Jay and well-known radio personality Nuno Mendes, I moved the conversation in direction of Pablo's recent CD release. Professor Pablo, a graduate of history and currently a high-school teacher in various public and private schools in the São Paulo municipality, explained that pedagogy was very important to him and he saw himself as a combination of teacher and rapper. He selected the image of maps to help key in consumers about not only the global history of Brazil but also the precarious nature of making history. He liked the idea of including a large number of shaky lines moving back and forth from West Africa to Brazil. Pablo viewed the territories themselves as unstable and deserving study. The sense of not being grounded in "reality" is what disturbs most of the Brazilian hip-hop community. "Marginal" hip-hoppers are, in fact, in the majority and their narrative, visual, and sonic discourses have established the present methodologies and epistemologies of the "real" connections between everyday life, culture, and social change. I identify the tension between "marginal" and "positive" (including "evangelical") hip-hoppers as the principal point of debate within the São Paulo hip-hop community and the strongest impetus for artistic creativity. It is the competition for both recognition and distinction that motivates hip-hoppers to appropriate and create visual signs, along with sound clusters and hip philosophical mantras, which theoretically translate experience into action and knowledge into respect. Regarding the examples mentioned thus far and those discussed below, hip-hoppers vary in their success at making these "combinations" and being persuasive about who they are and their multi-discursive perspectives on "reality." What remains relatively stable is the moral obligation and aesthetic desire to represent the everyday life of periferia.
Handwriting and the Popular Vernacular
The third example (at the bottom) demonstrates the integration of everyday neighborhood commercial flyer in the form of a butcher shop ad with the phrase " casa de carnes " and an upcoming hip-hop show by the group Território negro (black territory). In all three examples the designers made the sans serif type (without lettering projectors) wider than normal. "Marginal" aesthetes prefer the block stencil of GOG rather than the slim but increased kearning of Marcelo D2 , a pop rapper from Rio de Janeiro (thus subject to criticism for being a "sellout"). In my conversations with galeria shopping mall consumers and local performing hip-hoppers about these CD images among others, they identified with the script as either accessible (consumers) or similar to what they would do or have done (rap producers, event flyer makers). The reproduction of handwriting is a design of recognition. It is the transparency of daily practice that is not aleatory but engineered for the hip-hop community to read as familiar and worth a listen. Gog, a rapper originally from Brazil's capital city of Brasília and now relocated in Campinas nearby to São Paulo, has consistently attempted to articulate image motifs of fire, sans serif block lettering, and color schemes of black and red with an apocalyptic perspective on daily reality in Brazil's (sub)urban spaces. In his songs and occasional interviews Gog details the conflict between periferia misery and the current socio-political system. For him, this is the central point of violence. In the case of Gog, fans and local hip-hoppers link the fire motifs and political rhetoric coherently and thus most hip-hoppers respect Gog. He along with Racionais MCs remain at the forefront of "marginal" hip-hop, because they succeed in providing discursive coherence. Their respective distinction emerges from their talents in poetically describing and vocally enunciating reality as daily conflict.
In addition, some hip-hoppers express graphic discourse in the everyday typographies of local protestant churches. There are at least three different ways hip-hoppers read the exaggerated, baroque serifs of Goudy Lombardic Capitals of the immensely popular (not pop) Racionais MCs (1997) and Facção Central (1999) CD covers above. Many "marginal" hip-hoppers associate such typography with the bible and a messianic posture. This sort of reading comes to the fore in contexts such as introductory statements in gatherings of a posse, the general term for hip-hop organization (English term maintained). [4] The most usual procedural opening for a public posse meeting is to recognize newcomers and ask for a brief personal statement regarding their involvement in the "movement." While some simply state their name and/or stage name, their neighborhood, and the name of their group, a significant number of participants stand up and give testimonies. Many hip-hoppers such as Góis view hip-hop as akin to the church in that it constitutes an alternative place for sharing personal stories and building community. " Eu estou aqui porque o hip-hop me salvou. Não estaria aqui sem hip-hop." (I am here because hip-hop saved me. I wouldn't be before you if it weren't for hip-hop). Góis and so many others I observed began their personal introduction with such themes. Góis held back his tears as he related his encounters with the police, drug traffickers, and competing gangs. Others tell similar stories unflinchingly and in a deadly serious manner. Many periferia youth interpret hip-hop posses and local churches as the only places of moral salvation and social justice. It is an alternative to the dangerously competitive forms of social bonding organized around crime in the periferia. After a posse meeting in São Bernardo do Campo in 1997 I asked DJ Marquinhos to comment about then newcomer Góis' long-winded story. He explained that this is " normal " (commonplace). This would turn out to be true and Marquinhos himself gave his own testimony for an hour one afternoon as we waited for his mother to prepare lunch (rice, beans, and eggs). The memories of the "dark" past become immediate associations for thousands of hip-hoppers as they look at gothic typography and search for answers to daily suffering. The discourses of salvation and religiosity that Racionais MCs and others "marginal" hip-hoppers draw upon differ from that of "positive" hip-hoppers. For "positivists" such as Fábio Féter of the group Sistema Racional spirituality is a basic backdrop of life but not deserving public testimony. He reads such gothic typographies as a "combination," which approximates the scenes and rhetorics of charismatic church leaders such as Edir Macedo of the Universal Church. In our discussion concerning the production of Sistema Racional's first CD Assim Que Tem Que Ser (This is how it should be), he expressed his concern over developing a logo for the group. He was interested much more in target icons and jagged serifs than gothic or biblical typefaces. This is not to say that Fábio and other positivists are not spiritual. For example, I asked Fábio to comment on an apparently murky montage acting as a background to a group photo on the CD cover. He described that image as something akin to Deus (God) - a subtle but important presence in public and a strong force in private. Finally, the baroque lettering of Racionais MCs and Facção Central are indices of a different sort for "evangelical positivists" such as Lito Atalaia, Professor Pablo, Eclesiastes, and Shanolai. For members of Eclesiastes and Shanolai, two local evangelical groups from the extreme periferia in Campinas and São Paulo respectively, such typography works more transparently to represent biblical verses as such. Other evangelical hip-hoppers such as Lito Atalaia see gothic type as something of the past and seek rather to connect Christian spirituality with the future. Lito himself submitted a series of CD cover designs emphasizing directional signs and pale blues and grays inspired by the Internet and MTV as part of his layout to an external graphic designer for publication. The final product included the following montage:
Contradictions of Ideology and CD Graphic Design
Artistic and commercials elements such as typography exist on the frontier between discourse and objects. Typography indicates and symbolizes a number of experiences and places (indexical) as well as ideas and concepts (symbolic) to hip-hoppers both as they produce CDs and as they consume them. Typography connotes feelings of salvation, belonging, and conflict. In addition, it is also a material product, which contributes to an archeology of hip-hop. Following Lupton, "typography turns language into a visible, tangible artifact, and, in the process, transforms it irrevocably" (1994). Transformation emerges when hip-hoppers "combine" interpretation and social action. Hip-hoppers can then remake the periferia and thus refashion themselves. However, hip-hoppers relegate resistance, most easily "read" in rap performance, to very few discursive alternatives. Essentialist notions of what periferia resistance ought to be limit the hip-hop designer in search of resonant combinations of meaningful concepts. What Pedro Guasco termed the " estética de marginalidade" (marginal aesthetic), [5] has been the dominant discourse both in lyrical content and visual design. Until approximately 1998, the look of hip-hop represented on its most marketable and visible product, the rap CD, consisted of a unified but myopic design. The success of groups such as Racionais MCs, Consciência Humana, NDee Naldinho, Gog and later Facção Central established and codified a hip-hop "attitude." Hip-hop media sources and many young newcomers to hip-hop posses and recording studios explicitly associated discourses of "community" and "union" with the narratives of these "respected" groups. Their success began to limit the ways in which periferia youth were able to represent reality. Brazilian rap CD covers until recently represent what some have called "nondesign;" that is to say, printed material apparently void of any professional or conceptual notion of composition or graphic organization. I believe that this "nondesign" or overtly "literal" design articulates a widely held concern that design diverts the "reader" from rap's truth. Therefore, CD cover composition consists of a relatively small selection of image and typographical font categories. Rappers are extremely materialist in this sense, as they feel that they can best convey reality as a transparent force. It is then not surprising to encounter CDs with combinations of periferia landscapes with sentiments of danger, revolution, fear, and violence.
(translation of text: "A country makes itself from Education, who plants the weapons, collects the corpses, we've got to believe in the shantytown. Enough death for the sake of crumbs, enough death from rotting in prisons") A brief investigation into graffiti readability reveals the dominant logic of those hip-hoppers who position themselves under the rubric of "marginality." Graffiti is a type of "closed" semiotic system. It is not openly legible to all those potential readers who come in contact with it. As a type of writing whose very essence depends on its location, graffiti relies on the introverted gaze of place-centered narrative forms. [6] Graffiti demands a particular knowledge of operating codes of meaning and thus requires a heightened intentionality on the part of the reader. For graffiti artists and by extension practitioners of the hip-hop "marginal aesthetic," a relatively closed semiotic system is strategic in its hopes to be unified and resistant. Alternative perspectives demonstrate that a redirection in message (i.e. "positive rap") should be accompanied by a different visual scheme. This includes images of downtown, the use of Flash-software graphics, references to nostalgia, and use of earth tones and teals associated with U.S. 1960s jazz records produced by Blue Note. In addition, hip-hop designers employ futuristic typography to indicate not only potential but also the new spaces of hip-hop creation such as shareware located on the Internet. "Positive rap" designers also rely on simple typography to create a "clean" look. This includes a rearticulation of type sans serif , i.e. without lettering projectors. The juxtaposition of facile legibility with the wildly abstract or the out of focus or the mundane photo shot at a very low f-stop defines the "clean" aesthetic. Rapper Xis, whose 1999 CD cover appears at the far right below, mixes symbols of violence (pointed pistol) with high definition. In addition, his design includes the engineered "scratchiness," which has become commonplace after the success of the Hollywood film Seven (1995).
Conclusion
The visual divergences in Brazilian hip-hop, emergent over the past five years, demonstrate a certain preoccupation about the semiotic composition of group image. Hip-hop product designers adapt visual discourses in graphic material to show that the rapper is in search of information and thus active in his or her expression of identity. Despite the hegemonic position that the "marginal" system holds in Brazilian hip-hop, one can observe an expansion of graphics beyond the shantytown in order to include cosmopolitan realities (computers, metropolitan centers, diasporas). This expansion represents a questioning of ideologies theretofore sacred within hip-hop culture. In this essay I have attempted to call attention to an overlooked area of signification. While discursive and economic issues are foundational to cultural meaning and relations of power, I argue that what makes the visual and the sonic different and not readily collapsible into language is, in part, its materiality. The minutia of lettering, composition, and color are not grammatical but they are elemental in the complex systems of visual representation. Moreover, the visual is not only operative at the level of full focal awareness but is also essential in practices of distinction and selection when placed in the background of perception. Persons navigate through the world in a constant juggling act of multi-modal discourses. CD graphics are an example of the banal levels of cultural design, the complex process of engineering meaning and persuading potential believers. What is on the cover, far from being aleatory or simply manipulated, deserves more systematic, critical reflection so that analysts can better understand and more effectively represent musico-cultural phenomena such as hip-hop.
Notes
[1] In my research I found one noteworthy piece that used the concept "cultural design" - Cross-cultural Design (Steiner and Haas 1999). In fact, anthropologist Greg Guldin wrote the foreword. However, Steiner's opening statements as a working definition of the "cross-cultural design process" leave out a great deal of what contemporary anthropologists hold dear with regard to cultural critique and analysis. Namely, Guldin occludes processes by which social groups maintain relations of inequality. I quote Steiner's three-stage model: "1] Quotation. Here one uses, without comment, foreign images for their quaintly exotic flavor, as decoration. This stage is precariously close to plagiarism, employing icons without necessarily understanding them. 2] Mimicry. Working in the style or manner of an artist or school, here one attempts to understand to some degree how and why the model was done. The thrust is more towards re-creation than reproduction. An operative adjective is influence . 3] Transformation. In this stage, influence has been assimilated and the once foreign becomes personal and natural" (Steiner in Steiner and Haas 1999: 2). [2] All personal names related to fieldwork in this article are pseudonyms. [3] The namesake of the organization, Gaspar Garcia was a Spanish Frei (Catholic "brother"). He was involved with various literacy programs in Nicaragua and was killed during the civil war in the 1980s. [4] Posse is a term borrowed from U.S. hip-hoppers, who borrowed it from Jamaican dancehall and dub traditions (mixture of reggae instrumentation and rap vocal style). According to Dick Hebdige (1987), Jamaicans had appropriated this term from the American westerns. See also Cooper (1994). [5] See Pedro Guasco's master's dissertation (2001) "Num país chamado Periferia: identidade e representação da realidade entre os rappers de São Paulo" Departamento de Antropologia Social da Universidade de São Paulo, pp. 108-115. [6] See de Certeau's description of memories of city places. "Places are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times that can be held in reserve, remaining in an enigmatic state, . . . this is a sort of knowledge that remains silent. Only hints of what is known but unrevealed are passed on 'just between you and me'" (1984: 108).
References Cited
Amaral, Marina Bonduki, Nabil and Raquel Rolnik Bourdieu, Pierre Caldeira, Teresa P.R. Certeau, Michel de Cooper, Carolyn 1994. 'Lyrical Gun': Metaphor and Role play in Jamaican Dancehall Culture. In Massachusetts Review 35.3-4: 429-447. Fabris, Anna Teresa Globo SPTV Guasco, Pedro Paulo M. Hebdige, Dick Lupton, Ellen Rebello, Rafael Sevcenko, Nicolau Steiner, Henry and Ken Haas
Fieldwork Interviews
Brown, King Nino Sérgio Verbo Pesado Discography
Apocalipse 16 Facção Central 1999. Versos Sangrentos, Five Special. Gog 1997. Das Trevas Á Luz, Zambia Records. Lito Atalaia Na Mira da Sociedade Professor Pablo Racionais MCs Sistema Racional Thaíde e DJ Hum Vítima Fatal Xis |
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Derek Pardue is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Union College in Schenectady, New York. His dissertation, Blackness and Periphery: A Retelling of Marginality in the Hip-Hop Culture of São Paulo, Brazil, is the first full-length ethnography written in English that depicts Brazilian hip-hop culture and the social networks that mobilize it. |
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